Tag Archives: 12th ave

County opts for ‘virtual open house’ on Children and Family Justice Center

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CFJC-Conceptual-Sketch2

Artist rendition of the upgraded facility

King County has opted to cancel a planned Saturday “open house of conceptual designs” of the controversial Children and Family Justice Center to be built at 12th and Alder and instead will hold a “virtual open house” with information and a survey about the project, according to an announcement sent to CHS.

The detention and justice center has been the target of ongoing opposition by protesters and community groups who say $200 million shouldn’t be spent on a youth detention system that disproportionately detains African Americans.

In October, the Seattle City Council voted 8-1 in favor of a land use bill that gave King County the ability to replace its crumbling facilities.

In order to reach more residents of King County, we are replacing the open house at the Youth Services Center on Sat Jan. 24, with a virtual open house of conceptual designs of the Children and Family Justice Center. For your convenience, the virtual open house and survey will be available online from Jan. 24 through Feb. 8, 2015.

The County will post the virtual open house on the Children and Family Justice Center website late Fri., Jan. 23, and email it to project stakeholders. www.kingcounty.gov/childrenandfamilyjustice.

Please use the survey at the end of the narrated video to share your priorities as we move to design refinement in 2015 and construction in 2016 of the badly needed new courthouse and detention center at 12th Ave. and East Alder Street.

The County will schedule an in-person event after the design-build contract is signed and the design refinement process begins. Details about a public engagement schedule will be emailed to stakeholders, distributed on the County’s social media platforms and posted on the project website when they are available.

The Children and Family Justice Center will better support the policies and programs that have helped King County achieve one of the lowest juvenile detention rates in the nation. Additionally, King County is leading an assessment and developing an action plan in 2015 to further our work to minimize youth involvement and understand and better combat the causes of racial disparity in the criminal justice system, many of which occur long before youth arrive at the detention center door. For more information, visit www.kingcounty.gov/childrenandfamilyjustice.

Our Town — with ‘celebrity guest’ Professor Willards — takes the stage at 12th Ave Arts

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1471280_10152667908066270_4908311122070856656_nLast week, CHS took you behind the scenes as the stages at 12th Ave Arts — the affordable housing + office + restaurants + theater + SPD parking development from Capitol Hill Housing — started to go into motion for the first time with Washington Ensemble Theatre’s debut of Sprawl.

This week, a second resident company will take the stage at 12th Ave Arts for the first time as Strawberry Theatre Workshop presents the classic Our Town:

Thornton Wilder—who begins Our Town with the direction, “No curtain. No scenery.”—might have been thrilled to stage his Pulitzer Prize winning play in a space where theatre had never been created before. His play pioneered a form of expressionism that demanded an audience collaborate in the creation of the story without the aid of production elements of any kind.

When Strawberry Theatre Workshop Artistic Director Greg Carter walked into the unfinished performance space at 12th Ave Arts on Capitol Hill, he decided that Wilder was uniquely suitable to welcome the neighborhood into a new venue.  “The idea of this production is that 12th Ave Arts is not a theatre until we make it one.”

Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Performance Dates: Jan 22-Feb 21
Performance Times: Thu-Fri-Sat at 7:30pm, Sun at 2:00pm
No Performance Sun Feb-1 (Super Bowl Sunday) or Sun Feb-22
Venue: 12th Ave Arts
Address: 1620 12th Ave, Seattle 98122
Ticket Prices: $36 General, $27 Seniors, $18 Students
Phone Sales: 1-800-838-3006
Online Sales: www.brownpapertickets.com

Strawshop says it is lining up celebrity guests to walk-on in the role of Professor Willard in Act 1 of each performance: “The walk-on opportunity is a gesture to the community in this celebration of civic life, and to thank the neighborhood for its support of 12th Ave Arts.” You can learn more at facebook.com/strawshop.

Northwest Film Forum’s film festival for kids turns 10

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Sally's Way from Trinidad and Tobago plays January 31

Sally’s Way from Trinidad and Tobago plays January 31

An annual celebration of the youthful joys of the cinema — and pajama parties — is set to return to 12th Ave’s Northwest Film Forum starting next week.

The Children’s Film Festival Seattle begins next Thursday with a world premiere performance of a new musical score for Buster Keaton’s classic 1928 silent comedy, Steamboat Bill, Jr.

Meanwhile, you can still score tickets to Friday’s pajama party with Caspar Babypants.

You’ll find the full 2015 slate of festival films, tickets and more information at nwfilmforum.org.

Northwest Film Forum rolls out the red carpet for the 10th birthday edition of Children’s Film Festival Seattle (January 22 – February 7, 2015), the largest and most respected film festival on the West Coast dedicated to children and their families.

The 12-day extravaganza celebrates the best and brightest in international cinema for children, and will include more than 175 films from 58 countries, including Afghanistan, Venezuela, Qatar, Nigeria, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Uruguay and Trinidad and Tobago. The festival will include live performances, animation, features, shorts and hands-on filmmaking workshops, all crafted with care to appeal to the next generation of movie-lovers, ages 3 to 15.

 

It’s time to put the arts in 12th Ave Arts as new Capitol Hill stages come to life

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The Sprawl set gets some paint inside 12th Ave Arts (Image: WET)

The Sprawl set gets some paint inside 12th Ave Arts (Image: WET)

A view from above at 12th Ave Arts (Image: CHS)
Sprawl rehearsal (Image: WET)
“There’s a hatch in the floor of each booth at 12th Ave Arts with a ladder!? It’s pretty much like having a treehouse. A treehouse full of fancy high-tech theatre equipment. Woa.” (Image: New Century Theater)
“calm before the storm” (Image: mmanness via Instagram)

The lights are up, the seats are set, and production managers are geeking out over new equipment. The inaugural season of theater at 12th Avenue Arts is ready to commence.

12th Ave’s three resident theater groups have been settling into their two black box spaces since the lights went on in November at the Capitol Hill Housing arts and affordable apartments complex. Strawberry Theatre Workshop, Washington Ensemble Theatre, and New Century Theatre Company have solidified their first slate of plays, which kick off next week. Continue reading →

A SIFF hit, Capitol Hill film My Last Year with the Nuns gets another run at NWFF

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Matt Smith and big ol' St. Joe's

Matt Smith and big ol’ St. Joe’s

It might sound like fun to see a truly Capitol Hill movie but My Last Year with the Nuns is not a pleasant film. Yes, Matt Smith‘s acting is compelling and at turns dazzling as he deadpans his way through a script that’s been honed for nearly two decades, telling the story of a “white, 13-year old boy” living in Capitol Hill circa 1966, during the protagonist’s eighth grade year at St. Joseph’s Catholic School. And yes, in his directorial film debut, Capitol Hill theater veteran Bret Fetzer pulls on decades of experience of doing a lot with relatively little and helps turn a one man stage play, and a $50,000 or so budget, into a smartly-composed and imaginative feature-length monologue film that was a hit at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2014.

But the film does not flinch as it depicts the the racism, sexism and homophobia that informed and constructed the young protagonist’s reality and helped define his identity, and that still resonates in the reality and identity of his older, somewhat more reflective self, who plays the narrator.

“When I put this together, I wanted to convey the truthful essence of my experience from the point of view of a 13-year-old boy,” Smith told CHS, “And I tried to tell it from the stream-of-consciousness of this 13-year-old boy in such a way that it didn’t take me off the hook.”

After its packed shows at The Egyptian during SIFF last year, My Last Year with the Nuns is returning to Capitol Hill for a week’s run at Northwest Film Forum, where it will be taking over both screens starting Friday. The film will show at 7 PM and 9 PM daily through Thursday, January 19. Members of the film’s crew are promised to be present at all screenings. Tickets are available here. Continue reading →

Lark nestles into its ‘grown-up’ Central Agency home

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Lark’s new roost in the old and overhauled Central Agency Building (Images: CHS)

Lark's ownership trio -- Sundstrom, J.M. Enos, and Kelly Ronan

Lark’s ownership trio — Sundstrom, J.M. Enos, and Kelly Ronan

In August 2013, when layers of metal sheeting were first getting peeled off the old File Box warehouse, CHS predicted that the area around 10th and Seneca would be completely transformed in 20 years. You can probably shave a few years off of that prediction.

After more than a year of preservation work on the 1917-built Central Agency Building, the cavernous food and drink complex is buzzing with activity. Central Agency’s anchor tenant, Lark, opened the doors to its new home December 4th after closing up shop at 12th and E Spring earlier this year. So far, chef/owner John Sundstrom said the reaction from his 12th Ave regulars has been overwhelmingly positive.IMG_3411

“We love the space,” he said. “It’s a little bit more of a grown-up experience.” Continue reading →

The top 10 films of 2014… on 12th Ave

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The Grand Budapest Hotel made Bush's list. CHS gives it ***

The Grand Budapest Hotel made Bush’s list. CHS gives it ***

There are some bad signs for the future of film — and some good. Let’s turn to Lyall Bush, the executive director of 12th Ave’s Northwest Film Forum, for some home hope. NWFF has posted Bush’s 2014 top 10 list. You can add your picks in comments. The constraints are time-flexible. We don’t really care what year the film was made — just tell us what you watched and liked in 2014 and where you saw it.

Civilization and its Disturbances: The Year in Film vis Northwest Film Forum’s Lyall Bush

  1. force majeure – asks us to regard nature against something like artifice
  2. Contempt — one of Jean-Luc Godard’s major films, and therefore one of the greatest films ever made
  3. The Grand Budapest Hotel — in his own highly designed way Anderson has made his Vertigo
  4. La Voz de los Silenciados — the film’s tale of human enslavement in New York quite originally suggests Czech surreal filmmaking from decades ago
  5. A Spell to Ward of the Darkness — a beautiful braid of the complex, the stirring, and the disturbing
  6. A Touch of Sin — a bigger film than he has previously made, harder and shinier
  7. Under the Skin — arresting film about an alien on the streets of Glasgow
  8. Nymphomaniac, Vol. 1 — Von Trier, and his leading lady, Charlotte Gainsbourg, make it something of a deconstruction of civilization and its discontents
  9. In Country — a documentary about Vietnam war re-enactors in Oregon
  10. Speed of Sound — what happens when the text message from a friend who died a year ago pops up on a phone

Outer Planet ready to brew its first batch, welcome neighbor cheese bar Culture Club

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(Images: Outer Planet)

For many new food and drink ventures on Capitol Hill, the first days after openings soft and grand are critical to success. But for 12th Ave microbrewery Outer Planet, this coming weekend — weeks before its planned opening — is when it all begins.

“This weekend is pivotal,” Outer Planet Brewing co-owner Renato Martins tells CHS. “We’ll be brewing the first batch then the countdown begins.”

If all goes well, Outer Planet will be lined up to opens its doors — and its Capitol Hill-brewed taps — in late January.

The culmination of months of work and on-the-fly learning by Martins and brewmaster James Stoecardo comes in a big week of news for the “nanobrewery” on the groundfloor of a new 12th Ave microhousing apartment building. By spring, Outer Planet’s brewery will be accompanied by neighbor Culture Club, a “cheese bar” concept from Melrose Market cheesemonger Sheri Lavigne. Continue reading →

Capitol Hill food+drink | Chavez will bring Durango-style tacos and Mexican small plates to 12th Ave

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Chef Chavez (Image: Cantinetta)

Chef Chavez (Image: Cantinetta)

Simple, focused, shareable small plates and tacos from Mexico’s northern city of Durango. That’s the concept for Chavez, the latest Capitol Hill restaurant slated for a soft opening — this time, just after Christmas amid a flurry of food and drink news on 12th Ave.

Chavez is a culinary coming home for Duranguense head chef Gabriel Chavez. After five years in the kitchen at Cantinetta, Trevor Greenwood’s Wallingford Italian restaurant, Chavez is taking charge with his hometown favorites in Greenwood’s latest venture.

In addition to a rotating menu of tacos and antojitos (Mexican appetizers), Chavez will also feature one main seafood dish a night and a tasteful-but-not-overblown selection of tequila and mezcal. Continue reading →

CHS Pics | Stevie Wonder on Capitol Hill

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Stevie Wonder came to Seattle this week to sing, make a compelling speech… and eat at 12th Ave’s Plum Bistro Thursday:

Before his visit with Makini Howell, Wonder worked up his appetite the night before in a show at Key Arena where he introduced one of his classics by sharing a little wisdom on the week’s unrest:

There’s a better use for this: The marquee lights up at 12th Ave Arts

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(Images: Alex Garland for CHS)

(Images: Alex Garland for CHS)

IMG_0916UPDATE: With speeches from a stage full of the movers and shakers who made the project happen, artists, and city and state officials, 12th Ave Arts opened its doors Thursday night.

Calling the project a new “center of community life” for Capitol Hill, Capitol Hill Housing CEO Chris Persons thanked the more than 200 capital donors who made the project possible and made way for a long roster of speakers there to introduce the project to the neighborhood. Rep. Frank Chopp got the audience on its feet to applaud “the Seattle spirit” and christened the largest of the two theater spaces in the facility with its first performance — his reading of the James Oppenheim poem Bread and Roses. The dignitaries even threw a few lines to the theater folk. Strawberry Workshop’s Greg Carter said he was ready to get to work in a building emblematic of Capitol Hill — a neighborhood with an environment open to creating “things that don’t make sense.” Continue reading →

Capitol Hill food+drink | Rachel’s Ginger Beer comes home to 12th Ave Arts

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This is what happens when you let Capitol Hill people into Pike Place Market (Image: RGB)

This is what happens when you let Capitol Hill people into Pike Place Market (Image: RGB)

Marshall, double fisting (Image: RGB)

Marshall, double fisting (Image: RGB)

Going to dinner and the theater at Capitol Hill’s 12th Ave Arts might not be the fancy-pants event some might expect. Capitol Hill farmers market born and bred Rachel’s Ginger Beer is finally opening a shop in its home neighborhood with a ginger beer and fry bar inside the new affordable housing + East Precinct parking + theater space + nonprofit office space + three food and drink space development.

“That was so a part of the drinking culture,” the Rachel in RGB told CHS while apologizing for being “boring” with a story about traipsing through Europe. “You get a beer and a bowl of fries.”

Hey, anytime there is traipsing involved, we’re interested. Especially when you’re talking les pommes frites.

Oh là là. Rachel Marshall’s latest Capitol Hill joint is slated to open this spring with all the goodness of Rachel’s Ginger Beer plus “a menu of crispy, hand-cut fries and 15 to 20 dipping sauces, including a fancy ranch.” The bar will serve ginger beer-based and carbonated cocktails. The bubbles will tickle. There will be ice cream for floats and, if you’re an animal, dipping fries. And you’ll be able to fill your growler or grab RGB to go.

“What I picture is kind of a place where you can go during the day and really feel comfortable opening your laptop but can also have a drink,” Marshall said. “And we can go into the night.” Continue reading →

SPD releases video in search for Seattle U armed robbery suspects, getaway car

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Screen Shot 2014-11-19 at 4.13.18 PMSPD robbery detectives have released security video and are asking the public’s help identifying the suspects and the getaway car in the November 10th armed robbery in a Seattle University parking lot:

Seattle University Robbery Video Released
Detectives are asking for your help finding two suspects and a getaway driver involved in a Seattle University robbery that happened November 11th (sic).

Officers on Wednesday released surveillance video taken from a Seattle University parking lot that shows two people getting out of a yellow Ford Crown Victoria. A few minutes later the suspects can be seen running back to the getaway car. One of the suspects can be seen turning and apparently point a gun at the victim across the parking lot. The car then pulls away and out of view.

Robbery detectives are asking for any information you may have on this case. Please call them directly at 206-684-5561.

Pixie Pop-up is a magical place sharing raw and baked treats from a 12th Ave doorway

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(Images: Pixie Pop-up)

(Images: Pixie Pop-up)

About 10 years ago, Meghan Kroh had a wholesale baking business called Pixie making vegan treats. The business did well, but after about a year and a half, it got to be too much for her.

“I wasn’t prepared for the success,” Kroh said.

But she’s decided to dip her toe back into the baking game with Pixie Pop-up, selling treats and snacks Saturdays in front of People’s Kombucha at 1711 12th Ave.

This time around not all of the goods will be vegan, though vegans will certainly have lots of options, Kroh said. Instead she is focusing on using organic ingredients and cooking “raw.”

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Fairy Fuel truffles

Continue reading →

Juicebox, Cafe Barjot scale up to satisfy two-block Capitol Hill dinner crowds

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Barjot’s new dinner offerings (Images: Cafe Barjot)

(Image: Cafe Barjot)

(Image: Cafe Barjot)

They’re not necessarily destination restaurants but there is a new set of small, neighborhood dinners spots around the Hill ready to serve their thousands of walking-distance neighbors.

“We did so very little marketing but I asked for an email blast to the building,” Wylie Bush tells us about drumming up customers for a few quiet test nights of dinner at Bellevue Ave’s Cafe Barjot. The cafe space in the Belroy Apartments development will officially open for dinner next week. Born as a daytime sibling to nearby Joe Bar this summer, Barjot is now ready to add nighttime duty with a small but powerful dinner menu and European-style cocktails. Nick Coffey, formerly of Sitka and Spruce, runs the kitchen and turned out pork sausage, ravioli, and delicata squash for the first nighttime run in the cafe space.

“It’s such an awesome space,” Bush said of the buildout originally completed for the ill-fated Chico Madrid project. “It felt natural.”

Juicebox for dinner
12th Ave also is adding a natural place for dinner but after a much longer test run than Barjot. Continue reading →